The event was billed as a sober meeting of adults. Instead, the tiny downtown hearing room yesterday was stacked to the rafters with more than 100 members and bootlickers of the United Federation of Teachers who behaved like overgrown toddlers on a sugar high.

The fine educators hooted, hissed and heckled at speakers. They shouted down anyone who dared disagree.

It’s a wonder a single brave soul summoned courage to enter the snake pit to speak out in favor of the subject of the day — something that gives unionistas sweaty nightmares: charter schools.

Charters are high-functioning oases of literature, math and hope planted in the poorest neighborhoods, and they threaten the educational monopoly to its very foundation. Because they work.

No wonder teachers descended on the hearing to guard their turf as fiercely as Tony Soprano protected the garbage industry. And you wondered what’s wrong with education.

Sen. Bill Perkins of Harlem set the tone of the hearing, demonizing charters — schools that are publicly funded but privately run. He compared them to Goldman Sachs, “conducting massive fraud at the expense of clients.”

He likened charters to Enron. I waited for the inevitable comparisons to Hitler or Martha Stewart, but he’d made his point.

Then, the fun began.

Educational pooh-bah and charter foe Diane Ravitch got into it, mano a mano, with Sen. Craig Johnson of Long Island, a voice in the wilderness of charter support.

Ravitch threw statistics at him, suggesting that, somewhere in the country, charters are bad. But he threw her own statistics back in her face, revealing the opposite.

“Things you don’t like, you gloss over it,” Johnson accused her.

Ravitch snapped back, “You’re cherry-picking data.”

Mom and Dad, please shut it!

Ravitch’s face contorted with anger as Johnson asked if she’d increase the number of charters, were it in her power.

“I would devote my efforts to improving the school system that enrolls 97 percent of students,” she barked. The audience erupted into deafening cheers. Perkins did little to shut folks up.

It got so petty, UFT President Michael Mulgrew corrected Johnson on the pronunciation of the word “English.” This, from a guy who pronounces the word “idea” as “idear.”

“It’s sad to me that for the second time in my lifetime, the UFT stood opposed to change,” opined Assemblyman Michael Benjamin of The Bronx, a charter supporter who seemed scared to speak too much.

The Albany-area teachers union sent reps who demonstrated that one Buffalo charter school sent staffers on trips to the Bahamas. Why not discuss thievery in Detroit?

Despite accusations, there was scant evidence that charter schools enrich demonic “corporations” at the expense of poor kids.